1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an RF tag recycling system for reclaiming RF tags containing information on goods to which they have been attached from consumers and reusing them, and to an RF tag collecting apparatus for use in such a system.
2. Description of Related Art
There is growing need to increase safety of perishable goods such as meat, vegetables, and fruit. One of the ways for addressing the need is to administrate information on production districts, distribution channels and the like of goods, and disclose the information to consumers so that they themselves can judge whether the goods which they are considering buying are safe or not.
There is a goods administration system (goods traceability system) in operation established for providing consumers with such information. In this system, information storage media are attached to goods so that the consumers in stores can know when and where the goods which they have just picked up were produced and processed, and through which channels the goods have reached the stores.
In such a system, bar-code labels can be used as the information storage media. However, since the storage capacity of the bar-code labels is small, the bar-code labels contain only identification codes of the goods to which they are attached in most cases. Accordingly, all other information items such as the distribution channels of the goods have to be administrated on a server side. Therefore, to allow revising or adding information items, or reading information items from the server, an environment that enables access to the server through a network, for example, has to be provided.
Incidentally, as proposed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Nos. 2004-043143 and 2002-236889, it is known to use RF (Radio Frequency) tags which are easy to read and write instead of the bar-code labels. The RF tags can contain many information items such as distribution channels, because the storage capacity of the RF tags is large.
However, the RF tags are far more expensive than the bar-code labels, and accordingly operational costs of such a goods administration system becomes exceedingly high if all the goods handled in stores utilizing this system are attached with the RF tags. The increase of the operational costs inevitably raises goods prices. For such reason, the goods administration system using the RF tags is far from widespread so far.